Fun House

21

Thursday night, there’s a big FUN HOUSE watching party at the Sand Bar, this nightclub with about fifteen giant plasma screen TVs downstairs and a dozen more up on the canopied deck, all of which are usually tuned to whatever sport is currently in season.

This is where me and my friends used to hang. Jess, Olivia, Mook, Katie, Becca. We’d sit around a bucket or two of beers and toss back crabcake sliders and fried zucchini strips so we could tell our mothers we were eating our vegetables. Now Jess and Olivia are married and have moved up to New Brunswick, where she’s finishing med school. Becca is still in town, helping her folks run the Mussel Beach Motel. Mook and Katie are both dead. Murdered.

I’ve been to too many real funerals for a guy my age.

So, tonight, off duty, downstairs at the Sand Bar, it’s just me and my old friend Bud. Not the bartender from Big Kahuna’s; the long-neck bottle of beer.

It’s been a lousy week. We still have no clues. Skeletor has not returned to the red, white, and blue grease pit. We’re not closer to catching Paul Braciole’s killer.

Yeah. I’m in what they call a maudlin mood. That’ll happen when you’re surrounded by mammoth speakers pouring out sappy music and everybody around you is sniffling back tears. Death. It’s a real buzz-killer.

“Tonight,” croons Chip Dale, the Fun House host, in his best “let’s-do-this-for-the-children” telethon voice, “we mourn the passing of a friend. Peter Paul Braciole. A young man so full of life, no one ever thought it could be snatched away from him so quickly.”

The screen fills with a slow-motion video montage of Paulie when he was alive. Tugging up his T-shirt. Flashing his pecs. Repeatedly. The wiggling chest muscles look even weirder at half speed, like some kind of underwater balloon ballet.

“I am The Thing you want,” we hear him say over a syrupy orchestra of strings. “The Thing you wish you could be!”

Here’s Paulie smooching Soozy K in the hot tub. Paulie and Soozy laughing as they pluck live crabs out of a tank at Mama Shucker’s Seafood Shop and, then, Paulie aiming the crab’s snipping pincers at Soozy’s boobs. Paulie flexing his biceps, Soozy pretending to do chin-ups off his bulging arm. The back of Ceepak’s head is in the next shot, one of Paulie stuffing Skee-Balls down the fifty hole.

I look around. People are simultaneously smiling and sniffing. One guy is dabbing at his eyes with a paper napkin. Then he blows his nose into it.

Nobody is nibbling their free popcorn.

Fried clams are going cold. Sliders are going unslid. The Sand Bar resembles a funeral home with bad lighting.

“But the end of one man’s life,” croons Chip Dale, shifting into ominous announcer mode, like the guy who does all the movie trailers, “marks the beginning of the hunt for another man: Paulie’s killer!”

Cue the dramatic music.

And the explosion sound effects.

Boom. Here come those animated graphics. And a very scary shot of Bill Botzong, arms crossed in front of his chest, glaring at the camera from under the brim of his New Jersey State Police hat, a hat I’ve never seen him wear before. Guess the Prickly Pear Productions people didn’t like his black-turtleneck-and-leather-jacket look.

“This is Fun House!” says Chip, strolling down Halibut Street until he’s right in front of the Italian-flag garage door. “Tonight? A special double feature edition: Funeral for a Friend.”

Another boom as that type crumbles to dust.

“To Catch a Criminal!”

He really hits the “K” sounds in both words, just like Marty Mandrake wanted.

Geeze-o, man. I wish Ceepak were here. But he and Rita are watching the program at home. Probably so they can talk about what furniture they should take with them when they move to Ohio. If Rita’s feeling the way I am right now, she might be ready to split, because she doesn’t recognize Sea Haven anymore. The TV has taken everything we love and flattened it out or glossed it up.

And still I can’t stop watching this drek.

We see Paulie and the gang having fun at Big Kahuna’s. “What should have been the most amazing dance competition ever,” says Chip, “waltzed off the floor and out the door when Paulie left the club with an adoring fan.”

We see Mandy Keenan flirting with Paulie, who, in the edit, looks like he only tugged up his T-shirt to flash her his pecs because Mandy kept begging for him to do it.

In one angle they cut to, in the background I can see Ponytail and his whole three-man crew. Now we go tight on Mandy’s face. I’m thinking Ponytail’s team got that shot.

“Meet Mandy Keenan,” the announcer continues. “A young woman who had a little too much to drink last Friday night. An eager admirer Paulie had hoped to let down gently, gracefully.”

“WTF?” I think so I don’t have to bleep my brain. Paulie had hoped to bang her, pardon my French, not “let her down gently.”

“Paulie Braciole was the sweetest man I ever met,” says Mandy, all dolled up for the cameras, a squiggle of black mascara trickling down her cheek. Somebody must have brought in a bulldozer and cleaned all the crap out of her living room. Instead of crusty Frappuccino cups and crinkled Cheetos bags, I see fresh-cut flowers and one of those Kinkade cottage paintings.

As I’m shaking my head in disbelief, I see Mr. America, the white-haired white supremacist from the French-fried version of Candyland. He’s at the bar, signaling for the bartender. She gestures back. Wants the guy to cool his jets, probably till the next commercial break. She’s glued to the TV screen.

Me, too, mostly because I can’t believe how unreal this week’s version of reality has turned out.

“He, like, walked me home,” says Mandy.

Yes, in the background, they are playing a slow, piano-only instrumental version of the Barry Manilow number. “Mandy.” Pure dentist-office music.

We see grainy, handheld camera footage of Paulie and Mandy stumbling up the walkway to her front door. They cut out before Paulie flips Ponytail the finger.

“I made us both some coffee,” says Mandy with a slight giggle. “Believe me, we needed it. Well, I did. I drank more than I usually do, because I was so excited about meeting a celebrity. Anyways, Paulie, was a total gentleman. He looked at me with those big brown Bambi eyes and told me his heart was already spoken for. He said he didn’t come to the Fun House to find love but, at the Fun House, love found him.”

Soft dissolve to Soozy K and Paulie all tangled up together when they played Twister on the beach during Episode Four. Cross-dissolve to gauzy footage of the two them splashing each other in the hot tub. Another dissolve, and they’re playing Frisbee with a puppy-but that footage is shot so you can’t see “Paulie’s” face, because I think they shot it after Paulie died with a body double and a rented dog.

“Soozy K and he were hoping to take their relationship to the next level,” says Mandy. “I respected that. Sure, I wanted him all to myself; what woman wouldn’t? But his heart could never be mine. I could see that. I felt it. Here.” She taps her own chest, I guess to give the camera a reason to go in tighter on her bazoombas. “So, seeing how Paulie was sober and I was still kind of blitzed, I lent him the keys to my car so he could run home and be with Soozy. His soulmate.”

Geeze-o, man.

At least the next thing the hidden manipulators of reality cut to is a snapshot of the car we’re really looking for: Mandy’s silver Mustang coupe, the car she calls Butch. We’re treated to several cheesecake shots. Seems Mandy liked to pose next to her car in several different bikinis in several different seasons, so this segment about the missing Mustang resembles a video version of one of those pinup calendars hanging in the oil-change bay at a skuzzy gas station.

“I hope someone finds my car,” says Mandy when they cut back to her. “I hope it helps the police catch Skeletor.”

Up comes a black-and-white title: WHO IS SKELETOR?

Back comes Mandy with the answer: “He’s the man who murdered Paulie Braciole.”

Boom! She’s wiped off the screen by the “To Catch a Killer” graphics.

“More from the funeral,” says the breathlessly excited announcer, “and how you can help the police catch Paulie’s killer-after the break!”

Then, believe it or not, they roll a Ford car commercial.

For their new Mustang model.

I’ve seen enough. I’m ready to head for home.

But when I turn to leave, Mr. Deep Fried Pepsi Balls is standing there, two beers in one hand. He head-bobs toward the other chair at my table.

“Anybody sitting there?”

“Nope. You can have both seats. I’m out of here.”

He holds out one of the beers.

“I bought you a beer.”

I check out the bottle gripped between his fingers, mostly so I can check out those knuckles Ceepak noticed. Yep. They’re both there. 8 and 8.

“Thanks,” I say, “but I’m not really thirsty.”

“I talked to Thomas.”

“Who?”

“Skeletor.”